Writers in the Storm

by Karen DeBonis

In May 2023, I will become a published author for the first time. Learning as I go and with every new tidbit of knowledge, I realize how much more there is to learn—launch teams, media interviews, book readings, blurbs, Amazon and Facebook ads, trailers, preorders… I have to do it all, I think. I have only one shot. I must succeed. Every time I take a break, I think about all I could be doing, everything I should be doing.

Is this normal newbie jitters? Or have I succumbed to toxic productivity?

This term was first coined in the 1970s by New York Times best-selling author Dr. Wayne Dyer. He defined it as:

"a state of mind where people feel they have to be productive all the time, no matter what the cost, be it personal relationships or family life."

Of course, our Western culture was built on unhealthy expectations of work output. Then, when COVID sent many employees home to work, toxic productivity—also called "workaholism on steroids" began to bleed into our personal spaces as well.

But most writers wrote at home long before the pandemic, so how do we know if our drive to create prose or poetry has become problematic?

Some signs of toxic productivity are common to other stress-inducing habits or work environments: sleeping poorly, fatigue or exhaustion, eating too little or too much, foregoing exercise, neglecting relationships, relying on alcohol or other drugs to relax. But there are a few signs that are specific to toxic productivity. Below, I put them in the context of a writer’s life.

6 signs of toxic productivity for a writer

1. You feel guilty taking breaks. When your partner sees you in the kitchen getting a snack, you feel the need to defend yourself before you hurry back to your writing desk.

2. Downtime makes you anxious. You’re having coffee with friends, but you can’t concentrate on the conversation, you keep looking at the time, and finally invent an excuse to leave.

3. You resist doing things that are not goal-oriented. You stop journaling or writing for pleasure because those won’t get your WIP done.

4. Time spent doing anything other than writing feels like a waste. You lose interest in hobbies you used to enjoy.

5. You’re hooked on self-help books, webinars, and classes. Although self-improvement is a worthwhile pursuit, you’re never content with what you learn and end up feeling worse about yourself.

6. Achieving your goal is unsatisfying because it signals an end of your productivity. You don’t experience joy and satisfaction in a completed or published WIP, but instead feel anxious and purposeless. (Writers may experience this as post-publication depression.)

If these signs don’t help you make a clear assessment of your writing life, the key identifying characteristic of toxic productivity may clarify your tipping point:

The key identifying characteristic of toxic productivity is “producing for the sake of producing.”

And what if you conclude these signs do apply to you? What’s the big deal?

Like any lifestyle that encompasses chronic stress and an intense workload, we associate toxic productivity with a variety of health risks.

Potential health consequences of toxic productivity

• Increased cortisol levels, leading to brain fog, high blood pressure, and other health problems
• Coronary artery disease and stroke
• Back and neck pain
• Depression

Write every day

This has me wondering about one of the most common pieces of advice given to writers: write every day.

Could this recommendation fuel an unhealthy drive to produce?

Some do

Many creatives excel with this type of consistency. Memoirist Marion Roach — my first IRL writing mentor—insists that writing daily is the key to success:

 “The when, where and how of writing…cuts to the chase, shuts down the excuses, stops the long soulful sharing and simply commands that you – wait for it – sit down and write every day.”

Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret is to use a large wall calendar to mark off days when he writes jokes. "Don't break the chain,” is his motto, meaning don’t allow a day to go unmarked.

Bestselling author Jeff Goins says,

 “If you want to get this writing thing down, you need to start writing every day. No questions asked, no exceptions made. After all, this isn't a hobby we're talking about; it's a discipline.”

Curious to know more? James Clear, a NY Times bestselling author, investigated the daily routines of 12 Famous Writers, many of whom insist on daily writing.

Some don't

I don’t write every day, unless you count tweets, emails, texts, and grocery lists. And even if I wanted to sit my behind in my chair and tap away for a set amount of time or a certain number of words, my chronic health issues sometimes make it impossible to concentrate. I know I’m not alone. Is there another model to follow? Is daily writing a must?

I dug a little deeper and was surprised to find many successful writers who do not write daily, like Cheryl Strayed, Carmen Maria Machado, and even Lin Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton, who said, "The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, ‘Hamilton' walked into it.”

And I love this by New York Times-bestselling author Daniel Jose Older:

Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I had…’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not.

Letting go of “shoulds” is poetry to my ears.

As I look over the information here, I think about my own writing life. I’ve never considered myself a workaholic, but I do find it difficult to stop when I’m in flow with any kind of project. I’m currently finishing up my final manuscript revisions, and it’s been all-consuming. When I need to rest or take a break, I revise. I justify it because soon I’ll be handing my manuscript over to the publisher, and then I’ll establish some balance.

Of course, I’ll have marketing to do…

My writing habits aren’t ideal, but remember that the bottom line of toxic productivity is “producing for the sake of producing,” and I certainly don’t do that. But I’m glad to know the warning signs so I can keep myself from that slippery slope in the future.

As far as our writing routine, perhaps the most important tidbit of wisdom to add to your cache, newbie or veteran, is this: you do you and I’ll do me, as the saying goes. Or, in the much more eloquent words of Daniel Jose Older:

“Every writer has their rhythm. It seems basic, but clearly it must be said: There is no one way.” 

Are you on the slippery slope of toxic productivity? If not, what is “your way?”

About Karen

Karen DeBonis' memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, about the collision of motherhood, people-pleasing, and her son's medical crisis, is forthcoming from Apprentice House Press in May 2023. You can read more of her story at www.karendebonis.com.

Top image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay

by L.A. Mitchell

I’m often asked, “Who pays for ghostwriting?” An all-encompassing response escapes me. My clients are people with the desire and resources to chase dreams, but they lack essential components to get them to the finish line. For celebrities, entrepreneurs, and the elderly, that component is time. For publishers, companies, and professionals at the peak of their careers, that component is writing talent. Clients come to me with vast and powerful life experiences, like musicians whose song deserves to be heard on a guitar with a missing string. 

As a ghostwriter, I am the missing string. 

Respect is the heart of a successful ghostwriting relationship. My clients respect the dedication it took to hone my writing skills. I respect that a missing string, while essential to the song, cannot take credit for beautiful music. 

I’ve amassed a network of remarkable individuals who come to me to be their words. They refer others so I can become their words too. Their identities remain protected, a component of that respect, but knowing more about the types of clients I help elevates the discussion around the often-misunderstood practice of ghostwriting and may encourage writers to share their talents in ways that have the potential to elevate us all. 

Celebrities

Always a fun topic. It’s no surprise that an estimated 70 to 80 percent of celebrity memoirs are ghostwritten. Peak earnings for ghostwriters fall into this category. Legacy publishers keep proven bestselling ghostwriters as favorites in their contact list, so once you’re in, you’re in. 

The main currency of clients at this level is trust. Unless you already know a celebrity, it can take years to build enough of a high-power network to ghostwrite at this level. For me, year nine aligned in a crazy, magical way. Through referrals, I was simultaneously ghostwriting for an international supermodel, a Sundance Film Festival nominee, a songwriter in collaboration with a Grammy-winning producer, and one of the most connected health gurus in Hollywood. One client told a publisher that he would not sign a contract unless I was his ghost. And like that, I was in.

If you over-deliver for mid-level ghostwriting clients, you will eventually run across someone with a powerful connection. The trust you’ve nurtured with mid-level clients transfers to your celebrity referral if that celebrity likes and trusts your mutual acquaintance.  

Entrepreneurs/Thought Leaders/Business Rock Stars

My first ghostwriting client was a software engineer who wanted a choose-your-own-adventure story for the Apple format. My most recent client in this category just launched his own nutritional company. I’ve ghostwritten for business professionals who do improv comedy at night, multi-million-dollar energy companies, and the guy handling my personal investments. What do all these business-minded people have in common? They all have a desire to control their own narrative.

Beyond the buzzwords of authority marketing and social proof, clients in this category want content that works for them, in whatever form best reaches their audience. Sometimes it’s an article in a trade magazine. Sometimes it’s a press release or a regular feature in a periodical. Not everyone has a dream to write a book, but almost every person can better connect to professional goals with quality written content.

You likely already know ghostwriting clients who fall into this category or are (at most) one degree of separation. Announce to your network that you’re interested in taking on writing projects in all forms. Then help professionals brainstorm how written content can turn into multiple revenue streams and elevate their professional visibility.

Mid-list Authors/Self-published Authors/Hybrid Authors

Self-published and hybrid authors who create a publishing company and master the production cycle from idea to release understand that turning a profit is directly tied to the number of releases. One way to increase output is to use a ghostwriter in the creative process.

One client, a traditionally published USA Today bestselling romance author, uses me for first draft assistance. She gives me a series bible and a detailed book outline. I weave plot threads, arc emotions, drive intimacy beats, and drop cliffhangers. Ultimately, however, readers want her, so she transforms my first draft into her voice. She loves revision, so this method works for her. Her publisher is pleased by her prolific output. She doesn’t get mired in her most challenging phase, and I spend my writing days in her fantastic story worlds.

Another market-savvy indie author client who pays close attention to subgenre trends hires ghostwriters. This allows her to chase reader demand while her personal writing stays in her favorite genre lane. In her case, she ties each ghostwriter to a different pen name under her control. It’s just as easy to tie a group of ghostwriters to the same pen name. Readers don’t notice voice differences the way authors do, or they don’t care. As long as the books deliver on the promise, this model works.  

Ordinary Extraordinary People

Ask almost anyone, “What’s one story from your life that no one would believe?” Answers to this question often deliver the best of humanity—stories that pull at the heartstrings and set us all firmly inside our feelings. 

These clients come from your network or from referrals. They may only have one story, one memoir inside them. That’s okay. One story may not make them the most lucrative client, but they are often the most loyal referrers. My litmus test for taking on such projects is simple: will this project make the world a better place? If hearing their story puts me inside my feelings, I embrace the project. This question helps me steer clear of the people chasing ego or using their memoir as therapy.

Others who fall into this category initially enter my stable as coaching clients but realize that compelling writing is a marathon, not a sprint. After a goal milestone, I ask, “Do you love writing or do you love having written?” For those who adore the community or the romanticized notion of being a writer but not the process, this epiphany sometimes leads to hiring me as a ghostwriter because we’ve shared their creative space for so long. Poets and screenwriters often have trouble translating their gifts into the narrative form, so we’ll tackle novels together. 

Book Packagers & Legacy Publishers

Smaller book packagers who post for contractors on marketplace sites like Upwork enjoy an established framework of contracts, communication avenues, and legal resources backing up the exchange of words for money. Book packagers and traditional publishing houses understand that talented writers travel in talented circles and encourage writers to spread the word among writer friends or ask their established writers to dabble in ghostwriting. Both business models treat ghostwriting with the efficiency of a well-established cog in the publishing machine.

If you want to ghostwrite for packagers or publishers and already have an agent and editor, communicate your willingness and your reasons for ghostwriting with your team. So long as your output doesn’t impact your personal career, you’ll be seen as a team player who prioritizes publisher success. If you aren’t yet connected to a publishing house, a quick internet search leads you to the opportunities offered by book packagers.

Ghostwriting has been one of the greatest blessings in my writing journey because of the scope of incredible clients who enrich my life and creativity. Everyone has a story to tell. Start from a place of respect, nurture your network, and you’ll be amazed at the projects that come your way.

Let’s kickstart that first client connection! In the comments below, identify one person in your network (no names, please) who might benefit from your writing talent, and I’ll help you with that all-important first conversation.

About L.A. Mitchell

L.A. Mitchell is a freelance editor, writing coach, and ghostwriter with 33+ books in the market and 7 Amazon #1 category bestsellers to her (top secret) credit.

The most recent release she can claim (a co-authored project) is The Nature of Shadows, a memoir set against the brutal backdrop of Liberia’s first civil war in which a discarded boy learns love and belonging from a series of individuals who shape his life.

 For the past 13 years, she’s ghostwritten everything from business non-fiction to epic YA fantasy to sexy romance and believes the best perk of her job—hands down—is her collection of fuzzy, going-to-work slippers. On occasion, you can find her helping talented authors launch a freelance ghostwriting business at Lawson Writers Academy. Visit her at la-mitchell.com.

Links: 

Lawsons Writer’s Academy class: 
https://www.margielawson.com/establish-a-ghostwriting-business-and-finally-monetize-your-talent/

Amazon buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734023414

Website: https://la-mitchell.com/

Over the last few years, I've shared "Top 10" lists from several authors on the topics of writing and success.

This list wouldn't be complete without Kurt Vonnegut, one of our great American writers. He has inspired writers around the globe like Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, and J. K. Rowling.

Plus, he always makes me smile. And his birthday is the day after mine.

Why Kurt Vonnegut Stands Out to Me

This is a man who had a terribly hard life and somehow managed to retain his sense of humor and hope.

He fought in World War II as a very young man and was captured and held as a POW by the German Army. He was held in Dresden and witnessed the Allied bombing that turned the city to rubble, killing more than 135,000 people. He was one of the few who survived. After the bombings there was more horror. The Germans forced him to dig up bodies from all the debris and burn them in huge bonfires.

The horror of that experience drove him to write his most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five, an anti-war novel he published in 1969. The book was selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time.

10 Favorite Tips from Kurt Vonnegut

Here are ten of my favorite Vonnegutisms on success, in life and in art.

1. Find a Subject You Care About

He urged writers to, "Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style."

This is actually one of the most difficult parts of noveling for me. Sustaining an idea, a story, a theme through hundreds of pages...in a way that keeps readers interested. That focus is exhausting for me and sometimes I've gotta stop, take a break, and write a short story or a few chapters in a different story.

(p.s. I guarantee if Laura Drake is reading this, her eye just started twitching. She's all, "story switching...shudders.")

Vonnegut is spot-on with the advice above. If we're interested, the reader is more likely to be interested too.

2. Write and Quit Your Damn Day Job

After selling his first story, Vonnegut wrote to his father and said this:

"I've deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year's pay at GE (he was a publicity guy for them)...I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God."

Many of you have already quit those "goddamn nightmare day jobs." Others like me are still dreaming of the day. Regardless of where you are on the continuum of being able to write full-time, that's some good advice. I also suspect that writers made more per capita back then.

3. Write for your audience.

Vonnegut felt writing craft was important, and that you didn't learn it for you. Here's his take:

"Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your reader will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an ego maniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you."

4. Your reader's time is valuable.

• Messy pages and lines waste the reader's time.
• Write with simple language.

There are several bullet points under this one because he felt so strongly about it. He really thought every writer should keep the reader in mind at every stage in the process.

"Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

• Write and cut.

Vonnegut had specific thoughts on what to cut from your novel.

"Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out."

5. Write off semicolons.

"All they do is show you have been to college," he said.

In many ways, this one could probably have been included in the previous point. However, Vonnegut didn't feel you needed to include semi-colons in those finished novel drafts. Ever. Since this made me laugh, it got it's own section.

6. Sound Like Yourself

Vonnegut understood the importance of "voice" and he explains it beautifully.

"The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child..I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

"I find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have?"

I have to tell y'all, that quote of his cleared something up for me.

I naturally slant toward Southern when I write. The voice in my head has a drawl. Since I did my primary and secondary education in California, that has never made sense to me until now. (I spent my early years in Virginia, Texas, and Missouri, interacting with an aunt who had a very pronounced Georgia drawl.)

7. Pity the reader.

This quote made me laugh.

"Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years."

"Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify, whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales."

8. His favorite style guide was Strunk & White.

"For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, a more technical sense, I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. E. B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

"You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say."

Now I want to write something "perfectly enchanting." Heh.

9. Write stories with defined shapes.

The inspiration for this post came from reading this article and then watching this video a few weeks back. It's worth your 4 minutes. He's so very joyful.

Vonnegut taught writing at several different colleges and writing programs and it's probably safe to say we'd all have loved to be in his class. Amiright?

https://youtu.be/oP3c1h8v2ZQ

10. Write for yourself.

Kurt Vonnegut taught college classes but he would also periodically address younger audiences. He'd give them assignments like this:

"Write a six-line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever..OK?

"Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow."

In other words, write the stories inside you. Enjoy them. Wallow in them. I hope you get to watch your soul grow.

Have you read any of Vonnegut's work? Which of the ten tips above is your favorite? Which one is the most challenging for you? Please share your wisdom with us down in the comments!

*  *  *  *  *  *

About Jenny

By day, Jenny Hansen provides corporate communications and LinkedIn advice for professional services firms. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction, and short stories. After 20 years as a corporate trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Facebook at JennyHansenAuthor or at Writers In The Storm.

---

Sources:

• 13 Ways to Write Live and Write like Kurt Vonnegut
• 8 Tips on How To Write a Great Story
• Kurt Vonnegut - How to Write with Style